Effective Cooperation-Facilitating Social Institutions Reduce Strategic Intergroup Biases

Abstract

Shared group memberships enhance cooperation, which can provide a powerful instrumental incentive for individuals to preferentially affiliate and coordinate with ingroup over outgroup members. However, we posit that incentives to preferentially affiliate are likely to be contingent on the full set of cooperative affordances available in an environment. Four studies tested the hypothesis that one particular alternate cooperative affordance – effective social institutions (e.g., rule of law) – can attenuate strategic affiliative biases by enhancing inter-individual cooperation across group boundaries. Multi-national survey data revealed that trust in cooperation-facilitating social institutions negatively predicts indices of affiliative bias, independent of other drivers and forms of intergroup bias. In contrast, national levels of corruption (weak institutions) predict greater bias. Finally, an experiment that manipulated the presence vs. absence of third party punishers or rewarders in one-shot trust games provided causal evidence that cooperation-facilitating institutions can decrease strategic bias among individuals not biased for other reasons.